How does $300,000 an hour sound? Walking away with $5,000 for his 60-second pitch, the winner of Thursday night’s MIT $100K Elevator Pitch Contest (EPC), Rouzbeh Shahsavari, seemed pretty excited about it. His idea? Nanoengineered concrete that is twice as strong, cuts CO2 emissions in half, and is dramatically cheaper than typical concrete.

The EPC is the first of three contests that comprise the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. It will be followed by the Executive Summary Contest and the Business Plan Contest. Now in its third year, the EPC is growing at an incredible rate. With over 350 registrations, we had more submissions this year than in the previous two years combined. As for its capacity to produce innovative ideas, just ask Riccardo Signorelli, the winner of last year’s EPC. Last week the Department of Energy awarded his company, Cambridge, MA-based FastCAP Systems, a $5.3 million grant to develop nanotechnology-enhanced batteries.

As an organizer of this year’s EPC, the experience has been pretty incredible. I distinctly remember how much energy I felt in the room during our kickoff meeting, and things seemed to take off from there. I was repeatedly amazed at the amount of work and energy that my peers put into organizing the events. All of that work finally came together at the finale show Thursday night (for a taste of that energy, see the crowd shot below and the small photo gallery at the end of this post).

The finale really does have a lot theatrics to it. With ”Space” as this year’s theme, the emcees were dressed as astronauts against the background of a giant spaceship made out of PVC pipe (This is MIT after all, what else would you expect?). Audience members clapped thunder-sticks together and shouted “3, 2, 1, Liftoff!” before each presentation. In addition to the pitches, the show featured an interview with the winner of last year’s BPC, Waseem Daher. When asked about the interview experience, he said: “Being a speaker was a lot of fun—it was definitely strange being on the ‘other side’ so soon, because I definitely still see myself in the shoes of the participants…taking a bold new idea—in our case, rebootless software updates—and making the case for it to everyone who is willing to listen (and some who aren’t).”

The format of the event kept the excitement level pretty high as well. The top 10 finalists from each of six tracks (Energy, Life Science, Development, Mobile, Web/IT, and Products & Services) were announced before hand and asked to be in attendance. Of those 60, the top 2 from each track would then deliver their elevator pitch to the audience and judges. However, the finalists didn’t know who they were until their name was announced and they were called down to give their pitch then and there.

During the preliminary rounds I was mainly out front at the registration desk, so I didn’t get a chance to preview many of the pitches. Seeing them at the finale, I was astounded by …Next Page »

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Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced today it has opened its Windows Mobile marketplace for developer submissions from 29 countries. The Redmond, WA, firm is also running a “race to market challenge” in which mobile app developers will receive prizes for categories like most free downloads, most valuable app, and most useful app. The contest will officially begin when the store opens for consumers this fall, and will run until Dec. 31, 2009. The move is seen as an effort to compete with Apple’s iPhone app store.

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Today Bedford, MA-based Zink unveiled the winning designs in a $25,000 contest called “Zero Boundaries,” launched to elicit creative ideas about how Zink’s inkless printing technology might be built into devices that young people and future mobile consumers could use to capture, modify, and share digital photos.

We’ve told you the story of Zink, the Bedford, MA, startup whose pocket-sized printers can make instant, 3-by-4-inch prints from any digital image without using ink. In essence, the company reimagined a thermal printing technique that was invented but never commercialized at Polaroid. In a contest announcement earlier this year, Zink (whose name stands for “Zero Ink”) asked designers and design students around the world to reimagine Zink’s own products.

The winning ideas hail from designers in the U.S., China, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Romania. They vary from an iPhone accessory to a little robot that crawls around on a giant piece of Zink paper, printing as it goes. The company has published slide shows and descriptions of the winning entries on its contest website.

Zink’s basic technology involves a thermal print head that applies precise pulses of heat to special paper impregnated with crystals that turn various colors when they melt. Contest entrants had to build their designs—whether physical models or 3-D CAD renderings—around the basic mechanical and electronic elements of the Zink printer.

“The designs were incredibly well thought-through and truly showcase the breadth and disruptive nature of the future of printing that only Zink can enable,” said CEO Wendy Caswell in today’s announcement.

In the “Youth” category, the company’s challenge to designers was to “make today’s youth crave Zink products in the context of their digital and mobile world.” The winner, Zink Mix, consists of an iPhone application that searches a user’s photo albums and social networks for pictures they might want to print, along with a fancy iPhone docking station with numerous sliders and dials for photo editing that give it the appearance of an audio mixer. Patrick Schuur, of design firm Maketropolis in the Netherlands, won a $10,000 cash prize for the design.

In the “Future” category, Zink wanted designers to reimagine printing altogether. The winning design certainly does that: called the Mini Giant, it’s a self-propelled, large-format poster printer that rolls across a piece of Zink paper the way a farm combine traverses a wheat field. A thermal head on the Mini Giant’s undercarriage exposes paper as it goes. The design came from Paula Adina Sumalan, a recently graduated design student from Romania, who also won $10,000.

The company also handed out $1,000 second prizes in each category and $500 third prizes, along with a $500 “People’s Choice” award, with the winner determined by voting at the contest website. Brazilian Arthur Ditlef’s design for a portable business card printer, called the SmartBC, won the popular vote.

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It seems like a good day for some music, so we thought we’d give you a little preview of the tunes you’ll hear at our rapidly approaching second annual Battle of the Tech Bands. (Tickets are going fast—get yours now.) So behold MP3s from four of the six bands that are readying themselves to rock on January 22. The other two bands are fantastic as well, but they do covers and our attorneys made us a wee bit nervous about re-posting those. You can still play tracks from the ever-suave Seymore Willie (which represents AMAG Pharmaceuticals, LSI, and ARCON) on its own website, and you can see EneRock, the power rockers from EnerNOC, belt it out in this video from some other, assuredly less fun, band battle.

So with  that, I give you…

…the pleasing twang of The Dirty Truckers, doing American Well and Sophos proud with “Boston Wrangler”…

…the cool electronic stylings of Harmonix’s The Main Drag in “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter”…

…the edgy pulsations of “Angel Hair” by  Anomopoly of Nano-C and Tekscan…

…and the indescribably delightful “Tatooine” by our indescribably delightful special guest, Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, featuring Xconomy’s own Greg Huang on bass.

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January can be a cold, dark, cruel month around Boston. But Xconomy plans to liven it up—at least for one very loud evening—with our second annual Battle of the Tech Bands, planned for January 22 at the Middle East Restaurant and Nightclub here in Cambridge, MA. If you’re a musician and at least one member of your band works for a local tech company, send in your MP3s before the December 12 deadline to compete for a slot in the Battle. If you’re a music lover (or you just like to watch geeks bang on drums), mark your calendar and buy a ticket in advance.

If last year’s Battle was any indication, the event will be a blast. We’ll have sets from five finalist bands selected by our celebrity judges (Boston Celtics Managing Partner and CEO Wyc Grousbeck, investor-musician Giles McNamee, and Harmonix Music Systems founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos), as well as a special musical guest band, Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, which features Xconomy’s own Greg Huang on bass guitar.

Finalists will be competing for seriously cool prizes, including band promotional services from Framingham, MA-based Nimbit and seven hours of studio time (plus engineering and production help) from Boston-based Bristol Recording Studios. There will be two Grand Prize winners: The crowd will choose the Audience Favorite using a text-messaging-based voting system provided by Cambridge’s Aerva. And our elite panel of judges will award a second grand prize for Most Innovative band (hint: there was a River Dance at last year’s battle).

But everyone wins, really. This year, Xconomy will donate half of the ticket proceeds from the Battle to two worthy local non-profit groups: The Science Club for Girls, which offers free after-school science literacy programs to K-12 girls, and the Community Music Center of Boston, a music school that serves more than 5,000 students per week in Boston’s South End.

If you’re a band member and you’d like to enter, go here for more details on how to submit your band for consideration.

If you’re only interested in attending, tickets are on sale now for $20 (they’ll be $25 at the door, so plan ahead) and will get you not only several hours of top-notch entertainment, snacks, and a free drink or two, but a chance to win fabulous door prizes.

Stay tuned to Xconomy for a list of the finalist bands later this month, plus added information about the door prizes and the lineup of events for the evening.

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38 Studios, the Maynard, MA-based game development house founded by Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, announced today that it’s repeating the “Massachusetts Game Challenge” it launched last year. But the company is extending eligibility beyond New England this time to all U.S. and Canadian college and university students.

The contest is designed to cultivate and highlight talented up-and-coming game developers by challenging them to come up with new video games involving the 38 Studios cartoon mascot, Munch, and its evil twin Mean Munch. Teams of up to three students are given access to art of Munch and Mean Munch and asked to submit finished, executable video games on DVD or CD-ROM by March 2, 2009. The company says it will evaluate submissions based on originality, graphics and artistry, technical achievement, degree of finish, and “fun factor.”

The team that creates the top-ranked game will be awarded $1,500 per team member. The second-place team will receive $1,000 per member and the third-place team will get $500 per member.

A team from Becker College in Worcester, MA, won first place in last year’s challenge for a game called “Munch’s Vacation.” The game, designed by Andrew Silvernail, Patrick Walley, and James Grant, is a difficult-to-describe takeoff on a cruise vacation that pays homage to classic arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders.

The second-place prize went to Chris Barrett, Chris Gingras, and Alex Gray of NHTI in Concord, NH, for their Flash-based game “Infectious Munch,” in which Munch chases, and is chased by, microbes inside a living organism. Third place went to Morgan Quirk, Andrew Tremblay, and Adrian Mejia of Worcester Polytechnic Institute for their game “Super Munch 2 Turbo.”

38 Studios CEO Brett Close told Xconomy last year that the Game Challenge was intended partly to demonstrate that the Boston area is an emerging powerhouse in video game development. But by extending the contest to all college and university students in the U.S. and Canada, the company stands a better chance of generating excitement about video game development as a career, attracting young developers to potential jobs at 38 Studios, and of course, receiving high-quality game submissions.

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Today, Amazon announced the seven finalists in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) startup challenge. These are young companies that are using the Seattle giant’s cloud-computing platform to build their businesses, and Amazon is rewarding the ones it thinks are the most promising. The grand prize is $50K in cash and $50K in AWS credits and a “potential investment offer from Amazon,” according to its website.

The finalists are: Encoding, Knewton, MedCommons, Sonian, Pixily, Yieldex, and Zephyr. They represent a really wide range of products, from video encoding to email and document management to Health 2.0. What they don’t represent is the Seattle area. What gives?

Tons of tech companies use Amazon Web Services as a resource, and to help grow their businesses. Last year’s contest drew some 900 entrants, and this year’s pool was probably even larger. You’d think there would be more, not fewer, innovative startups building on Amazon’s platform in Seattle, as compared to other places, if only because of local familiarity, experience, contacts, and so forth.

I asked a few ex-Amazon entrepreneurs whether today’s list says anything about local startups’ desire to build on the cloud platform. “My hunch is that the main reason for the lower participation levels in Seattle is probably related to a reduced amount of marketing outreach they did here for the startup challenge,” says Dave Schappell, founder and CEO of TeachStreet. This makes sense to me, given that Amazon probably wants to reach out to entrepreneurs in other geographic regions where it has less inherent influence.

Indeed, some prominent locals, including Jeff Lawson, the founder of telephony startup Twilio, see Amazon Web Services as a crucial tool for young companies around here. “We’re big consumers of AWS for critical, real-time systems, and I think it was a great decision despite the few, highly publicized outages they’ve had,” he says.

Lawson points out the advantages of having Amazon manage the hardware, and paying only for what you need. “Whatever Amazon’s downtime is, if we manage the hardware ourselves, it will be more,” he says. “Compare [AWS] to buying hardware to meet your spike demand, and wasting thousands of dollars on hardware and hosting those machines that mostly sit idle.”

Kevin Flaherty, co-founder and vice president of marketing for Wetpaint, chimed in as well. “We use AWS and have found it to be a fantastic resource,” he says. “From a startup perspective, AWS needs to be in the consideration set when it comes to scaling a business.”

So, why there are no finalists from the area remains anyone’s guess. Maybe it’s an artifact of the outreach and selection process, but maybe not. In any case, the startup finalists are presenting their ideas to Amazon’s judges at Seattle headquarters this month. There will be an Amazon event on November 20, where the winner will be announced.

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Xconomy’s first Battle of the Tech Bands last January was such a huge success—with close to 350 people gathering to hear six local groups, from the pop/dub/electronica hipsters Deadbeat Darling to the sonically massive Souled Out Superband to the proudly cheesy indie pop rock band MacAlister Drive—that we’ve decided to do it again. Same place (the Middle East in Central Square, Cambridge), same date (January 22). So, calling all New England tech bands: It’s time to send us your demos!

Half of all ticket proceeds from the event will go to benefit local charities. Once again, the play-off is open to all bands (amateur and pro alike) with at least one member who works at a technology, life sciences, or tech-investment firm in New England. We’ve lined up some great local judges to help us select the final six bands who will perform on January 22, including World Champion Boston Celtics Managing Partner and CEO Wyc Grousbeck, investor-musician Giles McNamee, and Harmonix Music Systems founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos.

If your band is selected, you’ll get to play for a big audience made of fellow entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, programmers, engineers, and musicians—and compete for some serious prizes, including free promotional services for your band from Nimbit. The audience will pick its favorite band, and a panel of Xconomy editors and select guests will do the same.

So join the battle and send us your MP3s now. Details on entering the contest are here—the deadline is Friday, December 12. Tickets for the event will go on sale soon.

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Wade Roush wrote:

Perhaps eager to remind software developers that the Apple iPhone isn’t the only game in town—or even its only game in town— AT&T is sponsoring a contest for New England-based makers of mobile applications for competing platforms.

The so-called “Fast-Pitch New England” contest, which was announced yesterday and runs through September 30, will end with the selection of one $10,000 grand prize winner and two $5,000 runners-up. The winning applications will be featured for one month on AT&T’s Developer Central website and at its consumer applications showcase, choice.att.com, and will be reviewed for possible distribution through one of the company’s application download portals, such as the AT&T MEdia Mall.

Only developers who live in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont are eligible to enter the contest, which will culminate in a November 12 ceremony at the Sheraton Framingham where three teams of finalists will demonstrate their applications before a panel of judges (hence the “fast-pitch” moniker).

It’s the first time Dallas-based AT&T (NYSE: T) has sponsored an application development competition specific to one region of the country. “The tech community is thriving here and we’re pleased to be able bring attention to a talented application development company in the local area,” Steve Krom, vice president and general manager of AT&T’s wireless operations in New England, said in the company’s announcement.

iPhone applications are specifically barred from consideration in the contest. (There are, however, several other competitive funding opportunities for developers of iPhone apps, including the “iFund” administered by partner Matt Murphy of Menlo Park, CA, venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.) And AT&T is not a member of the Open Handset Alliance that Google has organized to contribute to its open-source Android mobile operating system, which explains why Android developers are also being left out of the contest. (Google is offering its own cash prizes to the developers of the best Android apps.)

Instead, AT&T is asking software developers to submit applications that run on the non-Apple devices that the company sells, including those based on the Java, Palm OS, RIM Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile operating systems.

AT&T said in its announcement that the contest is designed to underscore the company’s commitment to “offer more choices than any other wireless company”—which is another way of saying that AT&T sells more than just iPhones. “Maximum customer choice is what real openness is all about,” said Krom. “Programs like Fast-Pitch New England help ensure that customers have the best applications at their fingertips.”

The Massachusetts Tech Leadership Council, the Massachusetts Network Communications Council, and the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX) are partnering with AT&T to sponsor the November 12 finalist demonstrations in Framingham. The national version of the Fast-Pitch contest has yielded such applications as Ascendo Fitness for Java, Symbian, and RIM Blackberry phones, and My Local TV News Over Wireless, which works on all phones with mobile WAP browsers.

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It was a good crowd, probably close to 130 people, that piled into Kirsch Auditorium at MIT’s Stata Center on Monday night. Four brave students were there to stand in front of them, each with only 60 seconds to pitch their business idea. Talk about pressure. And to add to their angst, the students had just listened to one of their teachers wax on about how eloquent and passionate and convincing they needed to be. Yours truly was to be one of the judges of how well they pulled that off.

Such was the scene at the first stage of a new business competition, the MIT 100K Elevator Pitch Contest that is being launched this year to add a new dimension to the famous MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition held each spring. Don’t be misled by the “100K” part of the name. The Elevator Pitch Contest, although it complements the 100K competition, carries a top prize of just $2,500. (There are also eight separate $1000 awards, including one for the most popular pitch, as judged by audience response.) For the spring event, teams need a real business plan. For the elevator contest, which is open to anyone with a business idea that hasn’t yet been fully commercialized, they just need a pitch.

The EPC, as insiders fondly call it, will take place on Saturday, October 13. (I suggested that we place the contestants in a box resembling an elevator, but that pitch, anyway, appears to have fallen on deaf ears.) Monday night’s event was a training session to go over some of the best “elevator” practices and offer an opportunity for a few daring souls to actually get some practice and demonstrate what to do—or, to be honest, what not to do. You could call me, then, a training judge or a warm-up act judge: no doubt through an oversight of the committee, I have not yet received my invitation to judge the real contest.

Still, it was a great night. After a brief introduction by Burt LaFountain, a first-year MBA student at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a member of the 100K planning team, Bill Aulet took center stage. Entrepreneur in residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management (and an Xconomist), Bill has ridden in many elevators. He’s also helped raise over $100 million for companies he’s worked with and even won the 100K as an MBA student himself (although as he noted, “I’m so old, I was a winner when it was the 10K.”). In any case, Bill, ever-dynamic and enthusiastic, was a perfect choice to lay out some basic EP principles for the audience. From a show of hands, the crowd was almost all students, most of them Sloanies.

Aulet noted that an elevator pitch can be tailored for different goals, from selling customers to attracting partners to raising money. But whatever the aim, he said, remember this: “It’s a pitch, it’s not a presentation. It’s the bare essentials.” The point is to generate enthusiasm and follow-on interest for an idea, so elevator pitchers need to deliver a picture that compellingly captures these ingredients, Aulet said: What is the pain today, who is feeling it, what aspirin you are offering—and why you, why now? “Sounds simple, but sometimes it’s forgotten,” he added.

To define the challenge more clearly, Aulet then pushed a button on his laptop so the students could hear first-hand the words of that famous business philosopher, Eminem. The inspirational …Next Page »

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